Page 45 of Love All
She doesn’t. She stays soft. She lies there in the wreck of my bed with her head on my chest and her hand flat over my heart, where she can feel exactly what she’s done to it, and she doesn’t take it back, and she doesn’t make a joke to cover it, and she doesn’t run.
“That,” she says eventually, drowsy, “was an extremely poor decision.”
“The worst,” I agree, and kiss the top of her head, and feel her smile against my chest. “Do it again?”
“Give me ten minutes, Hawthorne. I’m not a machine.”
“You kind of are. It’s one of my favorite things about you. Terrifying efficiency. Excellent backhand. Devastating in—”
“If you finish that sentence, you’re sleeping on the floor.”
“Worth it.” I pull the blanket over us. She lets me. She hums, unconvinced, and tucks herself closer anyway — which is the thing about Charlotte that will be the end of me: she’ll threaten to ruin you and pull herself nearer in the same breath, and mean both completely. I never once notice the contradiction. She fits against my side like she was meant to be there. Like the spot was waiting. I lie in the dark holding the unmeltable Charlotte Astor while she goes, slowly, to sleep on my chest — Charlotte Astor, who sleeps less than anyone alive, who keeps a chart of her sleep, who measures it in fifteen-minute blocks — and she justsleeps.There. On me. Unguarded. Like a person who has finally, for one night, put the whole heavy thing down.
I think about all the empty boxes. The empty box at every match, the audience-of-zero she trained herself to win for. I think about a nine-year-old in a cold house doing the math wrong on purpose, deciding safe was better than happy, laying the first stone of the wall. And here she is, twenty-one, finally, for one night, not safe at all. Wide open and undefended and asleep on the chest of the one person she swore she hated. And nothing has come to take it away. The cost she’s been braced for her entire life simply hasn’t shown up.
So I lie there and make her a promise she can’t hear, which is the only kind I’ve ever been any good at keeping: as long as it’s up to me, it never will.
I don’t sleep. I stay awake on purpose, because I don’t want to miss it, and because the quiet voice in the back of me, the one that always knows the cost of things, is awake too.
We did it. Crossed the last distance. No more pretending, no operation, no bet that matters, no eighteen inches, no wall. Just the two of us, all in, no exits, the one thing neither of us can afford to lose, now fully, terrifyingly ours.
And somewhere out past the edge of this warm dark room, though I don’t know it yet, and won’t for a while — a man I wronged a long time ago is watching all of it from the cold, and doing math of his own.
But that’s tomorrow’s problem. Tonight there’s a girl asleep on my chest who trusted me with the whole white-knuckled wheel, and I stay awake and keep watch over it, and I have never in my gilded, frictionless, perfectly defended life been so completely undefended.
Or so glad of it.
She sleeps eight hours. I count them, the way she counts hers. In the morning she’ll deny it, and I’ll let her, and I’ll carry the number around for the rest of my life like a trophy I actually, finally earned.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Charlotte
I WAKE UP on Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne’s chest having slept all the way through the night.
I lie very still and take a breath, because old habits are the last to die and mine die never. Eight hours. Unbroken. No three a.m. audit, no lying awake pre-running tomorrow. Just his heartbeat under my ear and gray morning light and the warm impossible weight of his arm across my back. A feeling in my chest I almost have to look up, I encounter it so rarely, a low, full, dangerous contentment. The kind that doesn’t ask permission. The kind I have spent my entire life refusing to issue a visa to.
I should get up. Getting up is what I do; the day has a schedule and the schedule has me in it. Instead I stay exactly where I am. I feel his heartbeat, and count it, slow. I count every beat, and then notice I’ve stopped wanting to count it and just want tofeelit, which is the kind of thought that should alarm me a great deal more than it does. Whatever he did to me in the dark, and he did a great deal, thoroughly, with a patience that ought to be illegal — the more dangerous thing is the after. The staying. The arm across my back. The not-leaving. I have survived being wanted my whole life.
I have no defense at all against being kept.
He’s awake. Of course he’s awake; he told me once he doesn’t sleep much either. Two insomniacs who somehow knocked each other out cold. “Morning,” he says into my hair, and I feel him smile. “You drooled on me.”
“I do not drool.”
“You drooled like a Saint Bernard. It was the most relaxed I’ve ever seen you.”
“I’m revising my entire opinion of you. Downward.”
“You don’t have an opinion of me. You have adossier.And it just got a new entry —drools, adorably, like a Saint Bernard— so it’s basically complete now.”
“I’m burning the dossier.”
“You’d never. You worked too hard on it.” His arm tightens. “Stay. It’s early. I’ll make terrible coffee and we’ll do nothing all day.”
And I stay. That’s the part I have to be honest about before the rest of it: I stay, and it’s good. I’m happy, and for about four days I let myself have it.
***
